Great news today from our friends at Pine64. The past month they have been working hard on the PADI IoT module based on the RTL8710 chip. Hard work has been done to make the RTL8710 developer friendly by delivering all tools to develop on-chip software. All this in a small 24mm x 16mm package:

PADI-IoT-Stamp.jpg (46.93 KiB) Viewed 4007 times

This module beats the ESP8266 in price at only $1.99 and the people behind it are working long days to make sure the software and documentation will be much more complete than it's ESP8266 competitor.

So what about specs?

WiSoC: RL8710AF, ARM Cortex-M3, 83MHz

RAM: 512KiB

ROM: 1MiB

Flash: 1MiB

WiFi: 802.11 b/g/n in the 2.4GHz bands

Peripherals:

1x SPI with 41.5Mbps

3x UART with 2x 4Mbps and 1x 38400bps

4x PWM

1x I²C with 3.4Mbps

Up to 19 GPIO's with 10 of them supporting interrupts

Power requirements: 3V3 (min 3.0V, max 3.6V)

Temperature: -20°C ~ 85°C

PADI-IoT-Stamp-Pinout-Diagram.png (43.39 KiB) Viewed 4007 times

It's not 100% compatible with the B&T RTL-00 module and firmware cannot be interchanged between the two. The PADI IoT Stamp will be compatible with IAR, openOCD and J-Link and it will support firmware flashing via UART, OTA and JTAG.

At the moment pine64 offers a GCC SDK based on Ameba but they will soon release ARM mbed 5.0 support. They have also been working on the AT command set and configuration through a server or smartphone app.